


no place to go (no place like home)

by notcaycepollard



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), X-Men (Movies)
Genre: F/M, I'm so sorry, Oh god, Pre-3x09, a little bit Edge of Tomorrow-esque I guess, involves 3x09 sneak peek conversation, not Grant Ward friendly, pain and angst, seriously extremely not Grant Ward friendly, this hurt to write, tiny X-Men character crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-03 23:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5310806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notcaycepollard/pseuds/notcaycepollard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It seems too good to be real. A universe where she could go back a hundred times, come back a hundred times and try again. A universe where she has a hundred chances to save Coulson's life. The hope of it hurts more than the knowledge, almost, but if it takes a hundred times, she'll try until she succeeds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no place to go (no place like home)

Daisy thought she'd braced for this, Coulson dying. When she gets through the warren of Ward's base just a minute too late, in time to see Ward take the final shot but not in time to stop him, she knows she hasn't braced at all. She sees the moment Coulson's head snaps back, knows Ward is seeing her see it, and all she can think is,  _too late_ , and then something blooms terrible in her chest.

Ward wasn't wrong; there's a monster inside her, one he's been so determined to wake up. And yes, this is how,  _this is how_. She's a monster with teeth sharp enough to tear apart the world.

"Don't you see?" he asks, his voice as low and reasonable and poison-sweet as it's ever been. "This is closure for both of us, Skye." Her name might not be the name she uses, now, but it's still a name she chose, and she never wants to hear it in his mouth again.

It's too easy, too simple, to rip him in pieces along the seams. She's tried to kill him with fists and bullets and words; it makes sense, suddenly, that it's her powers that can take him apart. He knows what she is. The man who knows who she is, knows her deeper than anyone else, is dead in a chair and she can't even look at him. It barely takes her a minute, and there are people in this building she still has to save. She can't stop.

"We're clear," she says ten minutes later, "the building's rigged to blow, we have to leave.  _Now_."

"Where's Coulson?" Mack asks, and she pushes back the scream, trembles a little with the suppressed force of it.

"Didn't make it," she manages, doesn't look at his face but hears his indrawn breath, walks into the containment pod and closes the door very carefully.

Seconds, minutes, hours go by, and even with the suppression material locking her in, she knows the whole jet is shaking. She's got an icer. She knows what to do. She's done it before.

 

 

 _Perhaps I can help_ , she hears when she wakes, and at first she doesn't remember. The voice is unfamiliar. Help with what, she thinks, and then sees it, closes her eyes, sees it imprinted on the inside of her eyelids.

"Perhaps I can help," the girl says again, and it's Mack who replies, his voice tight with emotion.

" _How_?" 

"You don't know what I can do," she says, patiently, and Daisy thinks, Kitty. This girl's name is Kitty. She's one of the Inhumans they managed to rescue from Malick and Ward, after-  _after_. 

"You can phase," Mack says. "Like Gordon."

"Quantum tunnelling," Kitty agrees. "That's not all I can do."

"What," Daisy whispers. Her voice is hoarse, her throat raw like she's been screaming for hours. She pushes herself up on the bed, touches her throat, tries again. "What can you do," she rasps, and Kitty looks at her very carefully.

"I can send you back," she says. "Your consciousness. I can send you back to an earlier version of yourself. You can stop this from happening."

"Show me," Daisy tells her, and Kitty touches her hand, and then-

 _Perhaps I can help_ , she hears, and Mack's voice.

" _How_?"

"You don't know what I can do," Kitty says, but Daisy does, Daisy  _knows_.

"You can send me back," she gets out, and Kitty smiles gently.

"How far back do you need to go?"

 

Kitty explains carefully how it works, this quantum tunnel through time, but there are only two things that Daisy fixes on. Time moves differently when she goes back. She could spend months, years in the alternate past and come back a second after she left. And she can  _come back_.

"I can fix on a catch phrase," Kitty says.  _There's no place like home_. It makes Daisy laugh painfully.

"Should I click my heels together?" she jokes, bites her lip hard.

It seems too good to be real. A universe where she could go back a hundred times, come back a hundred times and try again. A universe where she has a hundred chances to save Coulson's life. The hope of it hurts more than the knowledge, almost, but if it takes a hundred times, she'll try until she succeeds.

The first time doesn't work. She sees Ward take the shot and whispers it, immediately, the words drowned out by the noise of the gun.  _There's no place like home_ , and when her lips close over the final consonant, she's back in her bunk.

"Too late," she says, "can I try again."

The second time doesn't work. The third time doesn't work. The fourth time, she saves Coulson and the relief of it floods her, until she steps out into the corridor and finds Mack bleeding out in a doorway.  _No_ , she says, no, no, clutches at Coulson's arm.

"I'm sorry," she tells him, "I'll try again, I promise."

Fifth, sixth, seventh times all fail in minute ways. She saves Mack and doesn't save Coulson. Saves Mack and Coulson and watches the building go up with Kitty and the others still inside. Saves them all and watches Ward throw a grenade into the engine of the Quinjet as it takes off.

 _There's no place like home_.

 

 

She's breathing hard after the failure of the eleventh attempt, wipes away clammy sweat. This mission is doomed from the beginning, she thinks, there's no way around it.

"I need to go back earlier," she says, and Kitty nods. Daisy goes back two days, talks herself hoarse trying to convince Coulson of a different way to approach. It doesn't work. Three days, and she sneaks off the base, goes to Malick's earlier. Coulson comes after her, is shot in the back trying to protect one of the prisoners.

Four days. She relives the conversation with Coulson about Ward again and again, gives him different answers, sees if that will help. Nothing helps. Coulson goes in, and is captured. Coulson stays behind, and is kidnapped. Coulson goes in, and Ward straps them both with explosives, pushes the kill switch and says Daisy's name ( _not her name, never her name in his voice_ ) in the moment before they go.

"Nothing works," she whispers. Kitty brushes her tears away, sends her back further and further. Nothing works. She goes back, and back, and back, looking and looking for the time she can save him.

 

 

The mission to rescue Lincoln and Mike, she shoots Ward before Jemma even has a chance to try. Lincoln dies when she doesn't get to him in time, and Daisy feels it, feels the pain of failure. She can't make that decision.  _No place like home_ , she says, resets, starts over.

 

 

Starts over, starts over, starts over. Daisy's pushing back in time, now, reliving all their moments. Some attempts she spends months, years, letting things play out. How long has she lived? How long have they been doing this? Every reset brings her back to the same moment. Kitty's not exhausted. Kitty's been doing this for half a minute.

Some attempts, Daisy lets herself rest, lets herself enjoy the moments of peace she has with Coulson. "The most beautiful thing I'd ever seen," Coulson says, looks at her with his heart in his eyes, and Daisy tastes cherry licorice on her tongue, and then resets, because this version is going nowhere it hasn't been a hundred times already. 

 

 

She tries San Juan, and in the extra thirty seconds it takes her to aim for Ward's head instead of his chest, her father lands a hit on Coulson that he doesn't get up from.  _A hundred times_ , she thinks, remembers how she'd thought this universe was too good to be real. It hasn't been a hundred times, anymore. It's hundreds, maybe a thousand. She's lost count. Every attempt fails. Every attempt sees someone else go down.

 

 

The next time, she gives in. When he hugs her at the Retreat, she doesn't pull away, presses her lips to his instead. She doesn't need a  _friend_. She needs Coulson.

"Skye," he whispers, and she begs.

"Stay with me? Just for tonight?"

Coulson is tender, so tender, with her, and the brush of his fingers on her skin makes her cry for reasons she can't explain. He's so warm against her and she doesn't know why she held out for so long, why she held herself back from trying, except that when Agent Calderon fires at her and she deflects the bullet away, it clips Coulson just enough. Too frail, too human. This is why.

 

 

"Is that what you want to do?" Coulson asks her through the glass. "Run?"

"Would you run with me if I said yes?" she replies, sees the hesitation in his eyes. "We could," she presses, "Phil, we could go together. Don't pretend you haven't thought about it."

"What are you saying?" he whispers, and she takes a breath, lets him see it in her eyes. _Come away with me, Phil_ , she thinks, they could build a life away from all of this. Could she save his life that way? "Oh," he says, "oh, Skye, I-" 

She knows he's going to say no before he even says it. Before he knows he's going to say it, maybe. He has a responsibility to the team, now more than ever.

"It's okay," she tells him, soft and reassuring, "I get how it is. There's no place like home."

She doesn't know where they'd run, anyway, where she could take him that they'd be safe. Her mind here knows how to hold in her powers, but her body doesn't, and learning it all over again, he'd probably be crushed in a tumble of rocks, hit with exploding glass shrapnel, fall to pieces right in front of her.

 

 

She doesn't go into the temple after Raina, knows the diviner's purpose this time, and thinks,  _oh no_ , because this time, Trip lives but Mack doesn't.

"The timers," she tells May, "we have to stop them, can they turn off the timers? Mack's down there, Mack's  _down there_ , we have to save him." May's confused, clearly, doesn't understand what Daisy means, but she radios Trip and Fitzsimmons anyway. " _Tell them not to go into the temple_ ," Daisy begs, and May passes on the message.

She and Coulson sit by the drill hole, lean against each other, and Skye waits and waits for Raina to surface transformed and full of glorious purpose. She does, with sharp claws that slice through Coulson's jugular so fast Skye's shot is too late, and Daisy thinks,  _not like this, then_.

 

 

When Ian Quinn shoots her this time, she doesn't call for help, doesn't try to hold her bleeding in. Perhaps if she dies here, it'll stop everything. Coulson will live. She'd be okay with that, she thinks. She's gotten to love him a thousand times over. Perhaps this is the universe where he lives, instead.

It  _hurts_ , and she doesn't remember it hurting so much, the last time. Her eyes drift closed and when she blinks them open, it's to Kitty's face.

"You can't die," Kitty says very gently, "it just resets."

"Oh," Daisy says, "I thought..." and tries again.

 

 

"I love you," she tells him before she leaves, looks back over her shoulder at his face lit up with it. She doesn't know how this storyline works. This is the first time she's tried it.

Coulson's the one who comes to Afterlife. Coulson's the one who meets with her mom.  _No_ , she says, screams, no, please don't, please don't, she'll kill you, and her mother frowns, smashes the crystal right there in front of her.

 

 

She goes back further again, waits for Coulson to offer her a place on the team.

"No," she says carefully, "no, you know, I think I work better outside the system," instead of  _yes, yes, take me with you, yes_ , and the way his face falls, it hurts, but not as much as everything else. "Am I, uh, gonna get brain-wiped, or something?" she jokes, and he laughs, drops her off at her van instead.

"Let me know if you change your mind," he tells her, wraps the electronic signal blocker around her wrist, and it's all she can do not to roll her eyes. "Sorry," he says, "precautions. You're still kind of a Rising Tide hacker, you know."

"Yeah, Phil, I know. Go save the world," she says, softer than she intends, and he stares at her for a brief moment before leaving for the airfield.

Even with the bracelet on, it's too, too easy to gather enough recording of his voice from the tiny mike she'd tucked into her dress.  _Disengage bracelet_ , she constructs in snippets of his breath, plays it and lets the bracelet snap open in halves.

She hacks into SHIELD that night, just to check. It only takes her twenty minutes to find the report of a stealth plane downed over the Pacific. No survivors.

 

 

She joins the team, waits the week it takes for Ward to start training her. Her muscles don't remember how to punch, but she does. It's easy to get him up against the wall; he's surprised enough by her that he goes down, stays down when she pulls the gun on him.

"Skye, what-" Coulson asks from the stairs, and Daisy's not even breathing hard.

"Tell him," she says to Ward. "Tell him what you are."

"I don't-" Ward replies, wide-eyed and maintaining his cover just like a professional, and she punches him again. "I don't know what she's talking about. I don't know what  _you're_ talking about. Who trained you?"

Daisy laughs. "You did," she says, because he did, he will, he does. "Tell him. Tell Coulson who you're working for. Your secret's out, Ward."

"She's nuts," Ward tells Coulson, and Daisy doesn't flick her eyes away from him.

"He's working for Centipede," she says, because she can't say  _HYDRA_. That threat doesn't exist here yet. It's existed all along. "Pull up the files, Coulson. They're all saved on my desktop." It was barely a challenge. Someone might figure out, eventually, that she's faked some of the data, but perhaps by then HYDRA will have surfaced, and she can pull the real files, the ones that prove Ward was a wolf in the herd the entire time.

Coulson locks him in the cell, goes into Ian Quinn's mansion alone, and Daisy reaches the basement just in time to see Coulson and Franklin Hall fall into the gravitonium together.

 

 

Her van door opens and Coulson and Ward are standing outside, and even now, even after all this time, seeing Coulson's face floors her all over again. "I'm sorry," she says, "Coulson, I'm so sorry," and shoots Ward neatly between the eyes with the gun they don't know she has. Drops it and lets him cuff her, doesn't say a word even when he asks her, again and again, how she knows his name.

She spends eight months in a SHIELD prison, doesn't say a word the entire time, and then SHIELD falls just as she'd known it would, and John Garrett walks into her cell.

"Where's Coulson," she asks, and Garrett laughs.

"Shot him myself," he tells her, "hail HYDRA, et cetera," and Daisy whispers  _there's no place like home_ so fast all the syllables blur on her tongue.

 

 

This timeline, she tries so hard to stick to events as close as she remembers them, doesn't do a thing to change it even when kissing Ward makes her skin crawl worse than it's ever been before. She waits and waits, lets everything happen with a silent scream. Conversations are a little different, her interactions with Coulson more intense than she remembers, and it's hard, now, to remember what's the truth. 

She just has to see. She just has to find the pivot point on which everything can change. But there's no branch in time that works, no branch that doesn't end with someone dying.  _There's no place like home_ , she mutters to herself in her bunk, and tries again.  
  


 

"Sweet ride," she's saying to him, and god, god, his face is so tiny and young. The way he looks at her, the little smirk, his carefully-telegraphed flirtation, it makes her heart ache. Coulson hasn't looked at her like this in years (he looked at her like this yesterday, and two months ago, and a lifetime of lifetimes ago).

He says something about taking a hit in New York, and she can't wait anymore, pushes her hair back and lets herself say it.

"What could I tell you," she asks him, "that would make you trust me?"

"I do trust you," Coulson says, confused, and she sighs.

"Not like  _that_. What could I tell you, that would make you trust me enough to leave with me? To create a life somewhere else, before anything happens to us?"

"Who are you," Coulson whispers, and she pauses.

_I'm your destiny. I'm the ghost of Christmas future. I'll be the most beautiful thing you've ever seen._

"I'll know you," she says instead. "If you'll let me. Oh, I could tell you so much about yourself, Phil."

He doesn't go with her this time, and she thinks, no, too early, he needs more connection. He doesn't go with her the next time, or the next,  and she thinks,  _try later_.

 

 

They go to visit Cal, and his arm is still in his sling, and maybe this is the time when he'll say yes.

He says yes when she kisses him in Lola's front seat, and yes to a vacation of their own, and  _yes, yes, yes_ , when Daisy unbuttons his shirt, presses him down into the smooth hotel sheets.

"Let's leave," she suggests afterwards, pillowed on his shoulder and drawing idle lines down the shape of his chest. "Let's leave SHIELD, Phil."

"Skye..." Coulson murmurs into her hair, and she sets her mouth on his bare skin, whispers it to him.

"I'm gonna become Daisy, I think."

This time,  _this time_ , he says yes, again, yes to a life away from it all. Their apartment is small, unassuming, but there are flowers on their kitchen windowsill above the sink. Coulson cooks, and she wraps her arms around him from behind, looks at what he's making on the stove, kisses the nape of his neck. She steps away, picks up the pot of daisies to water, flicks on the TV they have at the end of the kitchen bench.

 _Three dead in a confirmed alien attack on a city hospital_ , the presenter announces soberly, and seeing Mack and Lincoln's faces on screen, Daisy drops what she's holding, doesn't even hear the pot smash.

There's no place like home, but this home, it can't be for her. She can't abandon everyone else.

 

 

This is the last time. Daisy's so tired, so  _tired_ , and maybe if this doesn't work, she'll walk away, stop Kitty from trying again, fall to her knees and mourn a world without Phil Coulson in it. (It's never going to be the last time. She could relive every moment she has with him a thousand more times, and it wouldn't be enough. She'd let herself fall into a limbo with him, and at least it would be a world _with him_.)

"If you knew," she says into the silence at the end of the conversation, looks across the table at Coulson. "If you knew I was going to die, and you couldn't stop it no matter what you tried, what would you do?"

"I'd tell you I-" Coulson starts, and then stops, and Daisy doesn't look away.

"I love you," she says, very quietly. "I love you, Phil, and if you go after Ward like you're planning, you're going to die. I can't stop it. I've tried." Coulson blinks, and Daisy still doesn't look away. His face is so good, his face is so intimately familiar, and she wants to remember him like this, his chin and his jaw and his eyes.

"You've tried," he says, his voice questioning, and Daisy nods, lets him see her exhaustion.

"So many times," she tells him. "Don't ask me how." Her shoulders slump with it, and Coulson reaches out, touches her hand.

"What do we do?" he says. "What do we do?"

"I don't know," Daisy admits, feels the tears begin to fall. "You're going to die, and I can't save you." She's never tried telling him before. She doesn't know how this goes. But Coulson's wrapping his arms around her, pulling her in, and all over again, she  _hopes_.

 

 

Her hope has never, never been enough, and she doesn't know how this time will be any different. "Stay with me," she says, "Phil, stay with me." She doesn't want to go through this mission again on her own.

"What if we don't try for Ward?" Coulson asks. "What if we just get the prisoners and get out?"

Daisy shrugs, because it could work. Anything could work. Nothing has worked.

They go in with Mack and May as a double team, back to back, clearing corridors more carefully than usual. Daisy takes down Malick, and Coulson ices Banks. This is easier than she remembers it being. It feels like a trap.

It is a trap. It's a trap they've set for Ward, and he falls straight into it.

"Where's Coulson?" Mack asks when she gets back to the plane, and she lays Kitty down on the nearest bed, clenches her jaw.

"We're clear," she says, "the building's rigged to blow, we have to leave.  _Now_."

"Where's Coulson?" Mack says again, and Daisy looks past him to May, makes eye contact, and the plane lifts off just a moment before the explosions start.

She'd watched him die, again. The same outcome as always. It's always the same. Gunshot. Ears ringing. Ward's face, delighted with it. Daisy sits very still, waits and waits.

They make it back to base, and she stumbles off the plane, stumbles into his arms.

"I didn't think it would work," she says, "Coulson, the LMD, I didn't think it would work, you..."

"I'm here," Coulson says, "I'm here," and Daisy weeps all the tears she's held in every time she's watched him die before.

 

 

"Kitty," she says, much later. Kitty's in the medbay, her shoulder bandaged, but she smiles up at Daisy anyway, pushes herself up to sitting.

"Agent Johnson, right?" she asks, and Daisy nods, pulls up a chair, sits down next to her.

"You..." she says, trails off, starts over. "There's a different future happening right now. I think."

"I sent you back," Kitty says, and Daisy nods.

"Yeah," she agrees. "Yeah, you sent me back."

"From when?"

"This afternoon," Daisy says, thinks about it, wonders if that's right. It's been so long. It's been a million years. It's been a single second. Kitty reaches out, tucks her fingers into Daisy's curled hand.

"Then I didn't," she murmurs. "You're safe. This is the future, now."

"It is?" Daisy asks, her voice breaking with it, and Kitty nods, looks from Daisy to where Coulson is standing in the doorway, squeezes her hand.

"You're safe," she says again. "You can say it, if you want. No place like home. Nothing will reset. Someone wants you, I think."

Coulson's alive, and Daisy's safe, and  _this is their future_. This is the home she's been searching for. It's everything she's hoped for, everything she's fought for. The branch in time she needed, the one she thought didn't exist.

"I'm so tired," she tells Coulson, whispers it against the pulse in his throat, and he lifts her up, carries her to his bunk, undresses her very gently and tenderly and draws her down into bed with him. They've done this before. Daisy's done this before. She's lived with him for months, woken to his face slack with sleep, the weight of his arms around her. They've never done this before.

They will. They'll do this forever. They won't walk away, and they won't fall, and someday, maybe, Daisy thinks, they'll grow flowers on their windowsill again, and it'll be home, where they are.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Oh jeez like sorry for this unremitting angst and Coulson dying a million times, it was mean. (Tumblr inspired me but I don't think they meant it like this)


End file.
